Have we not often heard it said of pleasure that it is always a process or generation and that there is no state or existence of pleasure? There are some clever people who try to prove this theory to us, and we ought to be grateful to them.
Now the act of sight appears to be perfect at any moment of its duration; it does not require anything to supervene later in order to perfect its specific quality. But pleasure also appears to be a thing of this nature. For it is a whole, and one cannot at any moment put one’s hand on a pleasure which will only exhibit its specific quality perfectly if its duration be prolonged. It follows also that pleasure is not a form of motion.
The Philebus takes from unnamed "clever people" the thesis that pleasure is always a coming-to-be and never a being, and uses it to place pleasure outside the class of the good. In Book X Aristotle reports the argument without naming its source and denies its premise: pleasure, like seeing, is complete at every moment, so it is neither a process nor a replenishment. Pleasure regains the completeness the argument denied it, though Aristotle still does not make it the good. That the Philebus is his target here is a scholarly reading; others in the Academy, such as Speusippus, are also proposed.
